Case Studies

DataCore Software, a leading provider of software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions powered by Adaptive Parallel I/O technology, today announced that its software-defined storage platform, SANsymphony, has been implemented on the cruise ship fleet of TUI Cruises, a joint venture between German TUI AG and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the world's second-largest cruise company. The SANsymphony storage platform delivers highly available and high-performance storage capacity for VMware, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange. DataCore partner BSH IT Solutions was key to the successful implementation.

"DataCore's scalability in terms of capacity, performance and functionality gives us the flexibility we need to respond to future challenges, whether it is on the single ships or for the entire fleet. In addition, SANsymphony has demonstrated total reliability. We plan to keep expanding our ‘Mein Schiff' fleet, and we will continue to rely on BSH IT Solutions and SANsymphony to sail alongside," said Matthias Fahrner, director IT Competence Center & Strategy at TUI Cruises.

Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that leading airline group International Airlines Group (IAG) is using Red Hat solutions as the basis of its hybrid cloud platform, serving as a foundational element of its digital transformation initiatives.

IAG has expanded its use of Red Hat Virtualization to provide the server infrastructure for provisioning new Group-wide services, helping IAG improve business continuity for mission workloads at scale while also delivering the necessary agility for the Group to improve existing services and quickly bring new business applications to market. As part of IAG’s plans to provide new cloud-based services, they have also selected Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat’s integrated solution for building and managing an open, private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, as the basis for its OpenStack-based cloud.

Five9, Inc., a leading provider of cloud software for the enterprise contact center market, was chosen by a large financial services company to transition its five contact centers from an unreliable premise-based solution to the cloud-based Five9 Virtual Contact Center (VCC). Since implementing Five9, the company reports that it has dramatically improved contact center reliability and uptime, increased agent productivity by over 10%, realized significant savings annually and was empowered with intelligent analytics to improve decision making.

The financial services company, which offers financing and loan services, both online and in-store to under-banked consumers, required a more reliable solution that would also increase efficiency in the contact center. The company’s initial decision to select and implement Five9 was also based on the need for custom reporting and robust analytics capabilities.

Printing virtualization innovator UniPrint.net Corp announced today a comprehensive case study of its 8 year history within The Welsh Government, which can be viewed in its entirety here. Beginning in 2008, Welsh Government deployed UniPrint.net’s Universal Printer Driver solution to eliminate the Citrix printing issues of this sprawling governing body.

Established in 1999, The Welsh Government (Llywodraeth Cymru) is the executive of the National Assembly for Wales. Spanning across Wales from Cardiff in the south to Llandudno Junction in the north, The Welsh Government has 44 offices, including 7 main offices, and approximately 6,000 users within their Citrix network.

As Microsoft prepares for its upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in July, the company has commissioned a study that shows that partners that have implemented cloud computing into their offering perform better than those who have not. The study, commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by IDC, showed that cloud partners – those with more than 50 percent of their revenue from cloud -- have 1.5 times the gross profit percentage versus other partners.

They also have 1.7 times the gross profit percentage versus the bottom group of partners surveyed. In addition, the top two quartiles of cloud-focused partners also grow considerably faster than the bottom two quartiles, the report showed. Moreover, Microsoft said cloud partners have 1.6 times the recurring revenue as a portion of total revenue versus other partners...

Scalability of cloud databases and the potential of big data cloud computing is the most challenging aspect when designing an elastic data architecture. It is technically complex to scale data storage and computing. At the same time premature optimisation for potentially superfluous scalability carries a sizeable economic risk and opportunity cost.

Today, technology firms and departments contemplating scalable database architectures have numerous database management systems and options of running them. Specifically NoSQL systems with flexible, de-normalized data schema have gained increasing market share with the rise of big data. Cloud and virtual computing resources and particularly Hadoop as a service are a paradigm shift. They introduced flexible architectures with managed technology and they transformed capital expenditure to operational one. Together NoSQL and cloud computing promise to bridge the gap between cheap and scalable data architectures...

Companies are moving their information technology functions to the cloud in increasing volumes – largely driven by the perceived cost benefits. The growth is significant, with Forrester Research predicting that cloud computing will expand from $41 billion in 2011 to about $241 billion in 2020.

The trend means organisations need to consider the legal, privacy and security implications of the change. “Cloud computing” refers to IT storage and processing that is located outside a user or organisation’s local IT infrastructure. This means that traditional IT services, such as the provision of email and the storage of company records or financial systems, are provided over the internet, with services often provided by a third-party company...